Godot Engine

This is a fairly small release but still something to be excited about! We found some small issues with the 3.0.1 release that we've decided were worth releasing a 3.0.2 for, the most important fix being that it's now again possible to run an individual scene of a project that does not have a main scene set. We also found the reason why tooltips were disappearing for some users, a bug that we've had for a long time.

We also have some love for C# users in this release: There was a regression using transforms from C#, and the commits that caused them have been reverted. Godot will now also no longer crash if you have a .mono directory created by an older release. This should make the C# workflow a lot better from now on.

We are pretty happy with the overall stability of Godot 3.0, that we released in late January. Still, we want to provide you with the best level of support, so we are going to make regular maintenance releases for the 3.0 branch, to bring backward-compatible bug fixes and enhancements to all users.

Our aim is that you should be able to just upgrade to 3.0.1 and continue developing your 3.0 projects without any change (apart from C# support, which is still in alpha and thus a moving target, but as such it's not distributed on Steam yet).

After more than 18 months of development, all Godot Engine contributors are proud to present our biggest release so far, Godot 3.0! It brings a brand new rendering engine with state-of-the-art PBR workflow for 3D, an improved assets pipeline, GDNative to load native code as plugins, C# 7.0 support, Bullet as the 3D physics engine, and many other features which are described in depth on the Godot Engine blog announcement.

This release took a while to develop, but we are very proud of the result, and we hope that you will enjoy it! Check the blog post mentioned above for in-depth review of the release cycle, changes in the community and details on new features.

As such, it means that projects made in Godot 2.1.4 can't be opened in 3.0 directly, but need to be ported. This can be done using the experimental "Godot 3.0 exporter" provided in Godot 2.1.4 -- a new 2.1.5 release will come soon with further improvements and fixes to this exporter.

To allow Steam users to port their 2.1 projects, or keep using 2.1 to maintain published games, we decided to ship both versions at the same time on Steam. You should now have the possibility to run Godot 3.0 (default), or Godot 2.1 (via right-click on the Godot Engine entry in your library, or by pressing "Launch" and picking the 2.1 variant).

Note: Eventually, we will remove the 2.1 version from Steam, so if keeping it around is critical for your projects, we encourage you to start using the standalone version outside of Steam, and use Steam only for the latest stable release.

Note 2: 64-bit Windows users should now have the proper 64-bit binary for their platform. In previous releases we used to ship only the 32-bit version, which works for both 32-bit and 64-bit on Windows.

Please report any issue you might find with the new Steam packaging for this release.

Image credits: Illustration picture courtesy of James Redmond (@fracteed) who helped a lot during the development of 3.0 by stress-testing the engine with great PBR assets and reporting the issues he found doing so.

The Steam version will be updated in coming days, and will offer both 2.1.4 (like now) and 3.0, with an option to select what version to start. This should allow you to start porting projects to Godot 3.0 without losing the option to run your existing projects in 2.1.4.

It has been four months already since our previous stable release, Godot 2.1.3 - and one year since the release of our stable 2.1 branch and the start of the work on Godot 3.0, which should soon see a new alpha build.

This exceptionally long development cycle for Godot 3.0 has encouraged many Godot users to contribute new features to the stable branch, in order to bring them faster to end users and to their projects. The side effect is that such features can introduce regressions, which we absolutely don't want in the stable branch, so this 2.1.4 release required a good deal more testing than the previous one. But as a result, it's actually a pretty exciting "maintenance" release with various new features and a great deal of bug fixes.

All in all, this is a pretty big maintenance release, and it should improvement the usability of the stable Godot 2.1 while we are waiting for the upcoming 3.0 version.

Support duration

As mentioned previously, the 2.1.x stable branch will continue to receive bug fixes and enhancements at least until Godot 3.0-stable is released. Given that Godot 3.0 is not planned to have support for OpenGL 2.x / OpenGL ES 2.x devices, we will likely continue to maintain the 2.1.x branch further until Godot 3.1, which should add back support for older devices.

So you can expect at least a 2.1.5 release in the future (especially in order to bring a more final version of the 3.0 exporter once the master branch is stable enough), likely in a couple of months.

Supporting the development

If you'd like to support Godot's development, apart from making cool games with it or contributing directly to the engine with code or bug reports, you can make a financial donation on Patreon to enable us to hire our lead developer Juan Linietsky full-time, thus greatly increasing the development rate of new features and bug fixes for Godot 3.0 and beyond!

The aim: make it possible for our most important developers, starting with the lead developer Juan Linietsky (reduz), to work part or full-time on the development of our engine.

Indeed, Godot is a non-profit, free and open source project, so all contributors work on their free time next to their unrelated day jobs. With funding from the community, we can hire Juan to work exclusively on Godot, and increase a lot our development pace! That means more features, less bugs, and faster releases :)

Everything helps, so if you like the idea, do not hesitate to contribute a couple bucks per month. The initial support from the community has already been beyond our expectations, but there is still some way to go to reach our main goal of a monthly wage for Juan!

Short of three months after the release of Godot 2.1.2, the community is proud to announce this new maintenance update in the stable branch, Godot 2.1.3!

Due to the long development process of the upcoming Godot 3.0 (see our Devblog for technical posts about its impressive progress), many contributors took a renewed interest in the 2.1 branch. This release therefore brings various new features to GDScript, the editor, some nodes' API – but we tried to ensure that compatibility with earlier 2.1.x releases would be fully preserved.

Highlights:

Audio: Add priority setting for samples in a library

Audio: Make spatial AudioServers prefer inactive voices instead of unconditionally playing on the next voice slot

That's it for this release, as usual it brought its fair share of bug fixes and improvements and upgrading existing projects to this new version should be hassle-free.

Support duration

As mentioned previously, the 2.1.x stable branch will continue to receive bug fixes and enhancements at least until Godot 3.0-stable is released. Given that Godot 3.0 alpha currently has no support for OpenGL 2.x / OpenGL ES 2.x devices, we will likely continue to maintain the 2.1.x branch further until Godot 3.1, which should add back support for older devices.

Five months after the release of Godot 2.1, and two months after 2.1.1, it's the right time for another maintenance release in the stable branch!

While we are all looking with avid eyes at the awesome developments for Godot 3.0 shown on our Devblog, you won't find much of them in this release... but it should already have some quality of life improvements and important bug fixes that you will definitely want for your published and WIP projects.

Highlights:

Networking: IPv6 support and many bug fixes and enhancements

Audio: Fix ~200 ms audio latency bug due to misinitialization of some drivers

GDScript: Python-like ternary operator (a if cond else b)

2D: Easy API for 2D split screen (with demo)

OSX: Fix minimum supported version when compiling with recent Xcode, now 10.9 (regression in 2.1.1)

That's it for this release, as usual it brought its fair share of bug fixes and improvements and upgrading existing projects to this new version should be hassle-free.

Support duration

As mentioned in various blog posts, the 2.1.x stable branch will continue to receive bug fixes and enhancements at least until Godot 3.0-stable is released - and potentially beyond, depending on whether version 3.0 will support OpenGL 2.x / OpenGL ES 2.x devices.

More drag and drop possibilities (and fixes) from and to the SceneTree, Filesystem and Viewport. Try things, some intuitive actions should now be functional (e.g. dragging a scene from the Filesystem to the Viewport to instance it)

Note: There was an unwanted change in the way shadows work, you need to set the Max Distance parameter that matches your needs, as it mistakenly defaults to 0. Check this issue if you notice something unexpected in your projects.

After almost six months of hard work, we are proudly presenting you the marvellous Godot Engine 2.1. Just like 2.0, this version focuses almost exclusively on further improving usability and the editor interface.

This release marks the conclusion of a series focusing on usability improvements. We have listened to and worked with our awesome community to make Godot one of the easiest game development environments to use. Our goal is and will always be to aim for the top in the ease of use vs power ratio.